Name: Kraken
Director: Pål Øie
Genre: Horror, Action, Thriller
Released: 2026-06-12
Duration: 94 min
Cast: Sara Khorami, Mikkel Bratt Silset, Ingvild Holthe Bygdnes, Øyvind Brandtzæg, Jenny Evensen

The premise of Kraken is almost entirely a matter of surface. A marine biologist comes to a fish farm in a quiet fjord community to study what the water is doing, and slowly the water starts doing something back. Pål Øie frames the threat as an absence first, a flatness that simply holds, the kind of calm a coastline wears for so long that nobody reads it as a warning. Then two teenagers turn up dead, torn rather than drowned, and the flatness stops looking like calm and starts looking like a lid.

What gives the film its hold is restraint about the thing underneath. This Norwegian creature feature keeps its monster offshore and off-screen for as long as it can stand to, trusting an aerial shot of a single kayaker gliding across a darker shape in the deep. The shape resolves, the longer you look, into the rough outline of an eye, and the fjord becomes the set and the antagonist at once. Øie understands that a creature is scariest as a rumor the landscape keeps, and he lets the geography do the threatening before any teeth arrive.

Sara Khorami plays Johanne, the biologist, and the casting sets the film’s temperature. She is not an action lead pressed into a wetsuit chase. She is the rational instrument the story slowly overloads, a scientist whose entire job is to explain the water and whose explanations run out one reading at a time. Around her, Mikkel Bratt Silset and Ingvild Holthe Bygdnes hold the human scale of a small coastal community that would much rather not believe its own fjord. The ensemble is built to be outnumbered, and the film keeps reminding you how few of them there are against how much water.

Øie arrives at the creature feature from the colder end of Norwegian genre cinema. He made his name on a claustrophobic disaster picture set inside a collapsing mountain tunnel, and before that on tight, domestic horror that worked by closing rooms around people. Kraken extends that instinct outward, swapping the squeeze of enclosed space for its mirror image, the open and the bottomless. The director’s eye stays the same, fixed on the exact moment a familiar landscape turns hostile, but the canvas could not be wider, and the fear is no longer that the walls are too close. It is that there are no walls at all.

The film leans on a real anxiety more than a mythological one. Its fish farm is not set dressing; it is the engine. The pens and feed lines and underwater cameras belong to an industry that has reorganized this coast and, the film suggests, disturbed something the coast had been quietly keeping. Signature Entertainment, picking the film up for the United Kingdom, called its message ecological, and that framing is legible on screen. The monster reads less as folklore than as a return on everything the fjord has been made to absorb, a debt swimming back up. Whether the metaphor earns its scale is the open question the film carries from its first frame.

That scale is also where Kraken is most exposed. A creature feature lives and dies on the reveal, and the same patience that makes the opening hour work can curdle into mere withholding if the third act cannot pay it back. The eye in the water is a promise, and the budget of a Norwegian genre production is not Hollywood’s; the film’s gamble is that suggestion can carry weight the effects line cannot afford to. The early deaths raise the stakes fast, but the picture still has to decide how much of its monster to show and how much to leave to the dark, and that decision is the whole game. Restraint is a strategy until it becomes an excuse.

Kraken runs ninety-four minutes. Pål Øie directs from a production by John Einar Hagen, Einar Loftesnes and Vindhya Sagar, with a cast that also includes Øyvind Brandtzæg, Jenny Evensen and Steinar Klouman Hallert. TrustNordisk is handling international sales, and the film has already worked its way through the festival circuit, premiering in Norway and screening at fantastic-film festivals across Europe, where creature features tend to find their most forgiving and most demanding audiences at once.

Samuel Goldwyn Films opens Kraken in the United States on June 12, a limited theatrical run paired with video on demand, so the fjord arrives on the largest and the smallest screens on the same day. Signature Entertainment holds the United Kingdom and Ireland. No Spanish, Mexican or Brazilian release has been dated yet, which means audiences in those markets will meet the water through its festival reputation and that single watching image rather than a confirmed screen date. For a film whose entire method is to make you stare at a calm surface and wait, the delay is almost in character.